AFL

AFL BEGINNINGS

There were only 12 teams in the National Football League when Lamar Hunt founded the American Football League in 1959. Hunt’s audacious challenge rocked the staid conventions of the NFL, and also hastened expansion throughout the world of spectator sports, by providing persuasive evidence of the nation’s thirst for major-league sports entertainment.

But before they merged with the National Football League in 1970, the AFLs eight original franchises were forged in the crucible of the most convulsive decade in the history of professional football.